Secrets

These “covert” operations are seemingly becoming more difficult to keep “covert” … Reports Chris Woods and Jack Serle of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Though the hour was late, Yemen’s social media…

Jim Nash writes in Scientific American: Earlier this year Iran’s defenseminister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to “easily” watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground. The announcement…

Robert David Steele Vivas writes on Reality Sandwich: The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police…

“NROL” is the designation for a series of classified satellites operated by the United States National Reconnaissance Office. As Ryan Gallagher reports on Slate: Last week, a new U.S. spy satellite was…

WikiLeaks takes on Sweden’s elite? Russia Today writes: The world famous whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims it has documents exposing Sweden’s FM Carl Bildt as an American spy and is promising to publish…

For more than a decade they toiled in the strange, boxy-looking building on the hill above the municipal airport, the building with no windows (except in the cafeteria), the building filled with secrets.

They wore protective white jumpsuits, and had to walk through air-shower chambers before entering the sanitized “cleanroom” where the equipment was stored.

They spoke in code.

Few knew the true identity of “the customer” they met in a smoke-filled, wood-paneled conference room where the phone lines were scrambled. When they traveled, they sometimes used false names.

At one point in the 1970s there were more than 1,000 people in the Danbury area working on The Secret…

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.

The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don’t exist — even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what’s known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal — part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice — would direct government agencies to “respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.”

Open-government groups object. “We don’t believe the statute allows the government to lie to FOIA requesters,” said Mike German, senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposes the provision.

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs the lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is also the author of several books: Torture Taxi, the first book to comprehensively cover the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program; I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, a book looking at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs; and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, a book that gives a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

Julian Assange may be about to address concerns over his comments last year that 9/11 truth was a “false conspiracy” which he found “annoying”. Assange made the statement despite Wikileaks’ 2009 release of half a million pager messages on the day of 9/11 from New York City officials, many of which contradicted the official story.

The Wikileaks founder is currently in London embroiled in an extradition appeal relating to allegations of rape, which many suspect are unfounded and part of a smear campaign against Assange.

An increasing number of activists are questioning Assange’s motives, including some of his former colleagues like Cryptome’s John Young. However, we have noted that Anonymous, the hacking collective that has vigorously defended Assange, is doing excellent work in exposing the power elite head on, particularly with their intention to shine a light on the secretive gathering of globalists at this week’s Bohemian Grove confab.